"Tron is not the film that broke the bank at Disney in 1983, contrary to popular belief. No, Tron came out in 1982 - three years afterThe Black Hole, which was moviedom's equivalent to the Hindenburg."

Soon after the printing press was invented, there was a guy arrested in Paris for selling Bibles on a street corner. The French police thought the guy was worshiping Satan because the Bibles all looked exactly the same.

This useless but fun fact brought to you by my foundations course in library school.

The original incarnation for Disney's Haunted Mansion ride was going to be a Ripley's Believe-it-or-Not style walk-through called "Professor Crump's Museum of the Weird". While the show was re-written to be the spookhouse that we all know and love today, certain design elements of PCMOTW survived...the statues that turn to face you, the grim organist, Madame Leota's seance room, and the evil faces in the wallpaper among them.

Also, when the ghost house idea became the de facto plan, the original ending involved the riders being chased through the graveyard by none other than the headless horseman from Ichabod and Mr. Toad. It was deemed too intense, so they revamped it into the whimsical version ghost party we have today.

The first ever American football game was played on November 6, 1869 (my birthday, incidentally--though 111 years before my actual birth) between Rutgers College (now Rutgers University) and New Jersey College (now Princeton University). Rutgers defeated a much bigger and heavily favored Princeton team 6-4 in a game that far more closely resembled what is known throughout the world as football but which Americans call soccer, with a few rugby variants. American football as we know it wouldn't evolve for another ten more years thanks largely to the innovations introduced by Walter Camp.

This first ever college football game was played on a random quad on Rutgers's campus (now the home of a gymnasium) by players in suspenders and no helmets, with a crowd of around a hundred or so sitting on carriages, doing cheers and chants based on Civil War marching songs. Sources differ over the Rutgers treatment of the Princeton players after the game. Pro-Princeton sources claim they were run out of town on horseback, while pro-Rutgers sources say both teams enjoyed an amicable dinner after the game before the Princeton players returned home in peace.

Princeton thoroughly creamed Rutgers in the rematch the following week, winning 8-0, since they were playing at Princeton under Princeton rules. Those were the only two games that year.

I...really like football trivia, apparently.

tom said:

yesterday i learned that "cwm" is a valid scrabble word. apparently it's pronounced "koom" and is a type of valley.